Building upon the planning grant for “Measuring Religious Change in the Global East,” this three-year project contains three components: (1) measuring individual religiosity with a new set of survey instruments in three East Asian societies, (2) mapping religious sites of multiple religions in the Global East, and (3) a comparative historical examination of the varied Christian growth in East Asian societies. This project hopes to accomplish the following goals: (a) improve the survey instruments of measuring religiosity in religiously diverse societies in East Asia and elsewhere, (b) construct a platform for spatial and comparative studies of religious organizations, (c) explore an ecological theory of religious change in modernizing societies in East Asia, and (d) cultivate the field of the social scientific study of religion in the Global East.
More specifically, we will carry out surveys in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan using our own pre-tested survey questionnaire developed during the planning grant period, which includes many new questions specially designed to capture religiosity in East Asian cultural traditions; we will acquire data of religious sites in East Asian societies and map them online, which can be used as a platform for the visualization of religious distribution, for comparative spatial studies of religious competition and interaction with other social factors, and for comparisons of religious change in East Asia; we will conduct comparative historical studies of Protestants and Catholics in East Asia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Meanwhile, we will offer research and writing workshops for young scholars of East Asian religion so that this field of inquiry can be better sustained and developed.
